Don’t mistake Trump’s proclamations for accomplishments

President Donald Trump's first few weeks in office have been a full-scale assault on America's attention span. There have been multiple news cycles about an aborted trade war with Canada and Mexico, a fantastical proposal for a US takeover of the Gaza Strip and the absurd question of how much federal agencies spend on subscriptions to news sites. To be fair, there has also been extensive coverage of more alarming events such as the pardons of Jan. 6 rioters and the apparent purge of the prosecutors who worked on those cases.

But is Trump actually achieving a lot, as both his fans and many of his detractors seem to believe? These are yet early days, but still: Count me as skeptical.

Recall that four years ago, then-President Joe Biden and his team unveiled their proposed American Rescue Plan one week before inauguration. The House and Senate passed a budget resolution with reconciliation instructions to set the law up on Feb. 5. Draft legislation was introduced in the House by Feb 8. After bicameral negotiations, on March 11 the president signed a $1.9 trillion package. This is about five times more than the entire annual budget of the Department of Education.

What about those 49 (and counting) executive orders? Granted, the sheer volume is unusual. But it's not as if Trump invented the idea of a splashy first-day/month-in-office rollout.

Biden issued more than a dozen initial executive orders, many with large fiscal impacts tied to the then-ongoing coronavirus crisis. That included a months-long extension of the pause in student loan collections and an extension of the federal moratorium on evictions. But he also established non-discrimination protections for LGBT employees, created a new ethics pledge for executive-branch employees, extended deportation protections for about 4,000 Liberians in the US temporarily, made changes to the Census, and took several actions related to climate change.

This is not to say that Trump's initial actions have been inconsequential. But it is a reminder of two fundamental facts of current US politics.

One is that the current president is, if nothing else, a show-business mastermind who knows how to stage a spectacle. The other is that progressives have much higher aspirations for policy change than conservatives do.

After Biden's enormous stimulus package, he got a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package done on a bipartisan basis. Progressives not only weren't satisfied with that, they even tried to block its enactment because they feared its passage would undermine the White House's resolve for even more change. They eventually backed down, setting the stage for a protracted argument over what became the Inflation Reduction Act. This resolved itself into more than $1 trillion in clean energy spending plus hundreds of billions in new health initiatives.

For all that, the predominant mood on the left was still a mild disappointment that they didn't get other things they wanted, such as a federal daycare program, an expansion of the child tax credit or universal preschool.

There's nothing wrong with high aspirations — or expressing alarm over some of what Trump has done. Disrupting a highly successful HIV treatment and prevention program in Africa, for example, is genuinely outrageous. But the idea that Trump, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have hit upon some miraculous new strategy for creating policy change strikes me as highly suspect.

The Biden administration used its rulemaking authority to make SNAP benefits 27% more generous at a cost of about $250 billion over 10 years, and basically nobody noticed. One of the big achievements of DOGE so far has been getting people arguing about things like a $20 million grant to create a Sesame Street-style show for Iraqi television.

As a veteran of the Senate Finance Committee once told me, all numbers that end in "illion" sound the same to most people. But they're not: It would take 1,000 Sesame Street grants to equal the impact of Biden's change to the number of years of work the Social Security Administration considers when calculating disability insurance payments.

If Trump lives down to Democrats' worst fears and uses DOGE's access to Treasury payment systems to cut major government programs, that would be a huge deal. In terms of what's actually taken place, though, the biggest news last week was that congressional Republicans can't agree on an approach to extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and are now looking at deferring that indefinitely in favor of a narrower bill focused on boosting spending on the military and immigration enforcement. If Trump were judged by the metrics that were applied to Biden, the story would be that his policy agenda is flailing in the face of narrow congressional majorities.

One interpretation is that he is a practitioner of a potent form of cultural politics that doesn't require actual policy change. A more deflationary account would be that Trump is pretty good at solving a basic dilemma of politics.

The Biden team was persistently torn between a desire to focus public attention on its most popular undertakings — negotiating down the price of prescription drugs, providing money for bridge repairs, making investments in American manufacturing — and the reality that the progressive base was eager for more drastic and politically controversial action on other fronts.

Trump, by making small-bore initiatives seem dramatic, has his core supporters cheering rather than demanding more. And yet the implicit thesis of Trump's current push is that his prior administration failed to address major problems with the federal government. But at the time, conservatives were thrilled with Trump — cheerleading for an administration that was relentlessly focused on Twitter battles with Colin Kaepernick while failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act or Dodd-Frank financial overhaul.

It's possible, of course, that six months from now he'll be breaking ground on the Trump Hotel Gaza City, and I'll have to eat my words. But for now, three weeks into his second term as president — and based on Trump's history of inventions and reinventions of himself across a long and varied career — I am comfortable saying this much: There is less here than meets the eye.

Sketch: TBS

Matthew Yglesias is a Bloomberg columnist and Senior Fellow, Niskanen Centre.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.